


Orbit

by SchlockJock (Eithe)



Series: Astrodynamics [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Codependency, D/s themes, F/M, Psychic Bond, dom!rey, sub!Kylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 18:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5675908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eithe/pseuds/SchlockJock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neither of them can escape the other’s gravity well, but they’re not in a stable orbit, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbit

**Author's Note:**

> Advisory: This fic has a lot of D/s elements with no negotiation, the relationship catapults into codependency basically before it even exists, and it has the inherent consent issues that arise from any kind of mental connection/feedback (in this case, a Force bond). If any of that sounds like it's Not Your Cuppa, consider giving this a pass.
> 
> That said, it's also pretty PG. Nothing racy happens.

“You still want to kill me.”

He sounded surprised in the forest, sounds surprised now. He shouldn’t be.

“That's what happens when you're being hunted by a creature in a mask.”

\---

He responds to the criticism by taking off the mask. He tries to be less frightening. To make her see a person instead of a monster.

She doesn’t dare believe any of it. She wants to, and that makes it dangerous.

It doesn't occur to her, at the time, that any of this will set a precedent. She's a little preoccupied with being trapped and terrified and certain she's going to die.

\---

The first brush of his mind is too much, too intimate, and she understands why he tried to set her at ease, first.

Impossible, of course, when she’s _strapped to an interrogation table_. She absolutely refuses to let herself cry, but she can’t keep from shaking. Somehow, that makes the rest of it worse.

Maybe the most awful thing about it is that the mental touch, under other circumstances, might not be entirely unwelcome. She feels alone, has been alone, so much and so long - and suddenly she isn’t, not even in her own head.

“Don't worry,” he murmurs. “I feel it too.”

That’s the moment she snaps out of it and starts struggling.

Her isolation is something for the dark moments of silence between sleeping and waking. It’s not something she shares. He feels it too? That’s horrifying, and she wants him out, with a sudden, shocking intensity. Maybe it’ll mean a keener edge to her loneliness, but she wants him out, and she will get him out. She will not give him what he wants, and she will not let him root around to find it himself, and she will get him OUT of her head. 

She isn't sure how to do it. She fights anyway. This won’t be the first thing she had to learn for herself. She doesn't care if he gets backwash from the sick feeling or the horror or the pain. It just means she'll be saving both of them when she forces him out.

He doesn't seem to expect a fight, somehow, even though it can't be a surprise. He knows what she's thinking.

He's trying to dig for what he wants, now. Hasty, hurried. He blunders through her mind with no grace at all, easy to find, and she shoves him back. He doesn't know how to scavenge, that much is plain. He doesn't know how to find something in a mind like hers, although what that means, she doesn't know. She knows how to thwart him, though, because she knows how to find what's hidden better than he does, and that means she knows how to hide things better, too.

So she does.

She makes her mind like the scattered debris fields of Jakku, hides what he wants, makes him push uphill through sand to get there.

He doesn't know what to do with the sand. He flounders. She pushes more of it on him, meaningless thoughts that bog him down, give when he tries to put weight on them.

And then she pushes forward, gets a taste.

It's strange: 

He's angry and full of sharp, slicing edges. He hurts everything around him, up to and including himself. But he's soft, too. He really was trying to be kind, and not as a ploy.

He was born on a world that was green and growing, that was alive, and part of him mirrors that still.

Even this ship has more life on it than she's been near in any moment she can remember before last week. 

She pushes again, pushes him back, pushes into his mind. His mind is a jungle, or it should be. He's done something awful to it - clear-cut the old growth, burned swathes. Just looking at it hurts. 

She feels a moment's pity. There's beauty in green, but it's delicate. A desert world can be reshaped, but it’s hard to break. Sand can take a strike without being changed. 

Green is vulnerable.

He flails and she meets him with sand. She pushes and - 

"You fear being weak."

The trails are obvious, even where the forest is burned down to naked trunks or felled to a stubble of stumps. She's used to finding her way in deserts where nothing stays and the wind washes away tracks. She uses that, hides away what he wants, uses years of sharp-eyed scavenging to hunt down what he tries to hide.

"You fear that you'll never be as great as he was."

Who is ‘he?’ Chase the answer, dodge around the barriers he tries to throw in the way. She's found smaller things, better-hidden and harder to reach.

"Darth Vader."

The name comes with a wealth of meaning, with feelings that don't belong to her, and she wants to be sick.

He feels too much.

\---

He pulls away from her. He leaves. It's a relief.

She slumps against her restraints. Too much feeling, and she's still reeling from it. Her own feelings have always settled lightly on her, weather passing over the surface of a world. His are shattering earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves - strong and sweepingly destructive, reshaping his inner landscape. The scope of the damage he’s inflicted on himself is staggering.

It takes her a long moment to reach for the guard. To get herself centered enough to push. And push. And push again.

The stormtrooper doesn't yield as easily.

This is another thing she doesn't remark at the time.

\---

He hurts and he hurts everyone around him, and she can't stop him hurting, but she can stop him hurting anyone else.

He presses down on his wound again and drives after her. It's all wrong.

He said she needed to be taught, but she doesn't need training to know that this isn't how it’s supposed to go.

He's hurting and it's wrong, and she's going to make him stop.

“You need a teacher! I can show you the use of the Force!”. 

She doesn’t need to be shown; it reaches for her.

She pulls on what the Force offers, on the life everywhere even on a planet the First Order has re-purposed to deal death. She sets her feet steady on the snow, and listens to something other than her own grief and rage, and knows what to do.

\---

He stops fighting her. She doesn’t know why; he’s bleeding out, but he was using his pain. This is something else.

He stops fighting her, and for just a moment, there’s a lightless void that yawns open under her breastbone. She wants to hurt him.

The planet tears itself in half, separating them. It is and is not a relief.

With nothing else to do, she turns to leave. His eyes follow her until she’s out of sight. He’s asking for something.

She tells herself she doesn’t understand.

She doesn’t _want_ to understand.

\---

She can feel him, after.

She hates it.

His head is AWFUL. He hurts all the time, clings to it, nurtures the pain like it's precious and needs tending.

 _Stop feeding it_ , she wants to hiss. He's old enough to know better. Pain will drown you, if you let it. He welcomes it like much-needed rain.

It’s mind-boggling.

She's furious with him and she hates him and she pities him and she wishes that were all she felt.

She remembers his mind the way she remembers her first glimpse of Takodana. She fights it, but can’t help the memories. 

She thinks of him removing his mask. Thinks of the surviving scraps of green in his mind. Wants to see that soft green tended and lush.

She pushes it down. That part of her is stupid. That part is soft, and vulnerable, and weak.

That part of her is dangerous.

It’s like spring bursting into bloom along the northern ridge of the Arcthe Canyon, when the cracked ground gives way to flowering plants for a scant handful of days. A tempting distraction from what needs to be done.

If she’s fortunate, it will be over just as fast.

She does not have time for spring, right now, or for pity. She definitely does not have time for gardening.

\---

They fight again. He hurts.

He hurts himself, lets her hurt him. Presses gloved fingers against his wounds.

And the physical pain is dwarfed by what he always carries around in his head.

The wrongness of it all makes her sick. The flicker of satisfaction when she gets a hit in is worse. She pulls away.

She can't do this. She can't fight him if it's going to twist her like that. He digs into a jagged cut, grips the hilt of his lightsaber with fingers tacky with his own blood.

There’s fire in his head, and it doesn’t belong there.

“No.” She won’t do this. She won’t help him do this to himself.

She disengages, withdraws.

He calls after her, and she breaks into a run.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

\---

He’s so LOUD now. He's thinking a hundred different things, and half of them are about her, and some of them are thoughts he curls around and SHRIEKS, and she can hear every single one.

 _SHUT UP_ , she screams back at him.

He does, thoughts shuddering to a stop, paused and held hovering. Somehow, it isn’t any quieter. The silence is just loudness waiting to happen; she can feel the pressure where it’s ready to pour out again.

_I am not going to hurt you more._

She wishes she were more sure of that, but she is going to make it true. He hurts too much already.

She shoves a hoard of thoughts she's been hiding away into his head. No secrets, nothing dangerous. She's a scavenger. She gives what she means to give.

But she pours out beauty and green and awe and horror. And the knowledge that he could be, should be, IS, better than this.

He goes truly quiet, then. Goes still.

He stops hurting, lets go, uncurls.

It's intensely satisfying.

 _You aren’t afraid at all,_ he marvels.

 _You are not that frightening,_ she thinks back.

Something in his head sends out shoots, delicate and green.

She wants to do something about that, and she hates herself for it. He’s a murderer. He’s a monster.

The conviction that he can be something else doesn’t matter. That it’s bolstered by the same certainty she felt during their fight just means the Force can lie. He could be better, but the fact remains that he isn’t. That he’s chosen not to be.

Several light-years away from where Kylo Ren has tentatively allowed himself feel at peace, Rey stumbles to get herself over a basin before she throws up.

Wrong. This is wrong. She's wrong. She needs to get farther away.

\---

Forgiveness is about letting go of pain, Luke tells her. Not about condoning what someone's done.

She really wonders if Ben Solo ever heard those words, because the man he became has no IDEA how to let go of pain. He curls around it and hoards it and nurtures the seeds of it into thorned vines to crash through in his pursuit of new and exciting self-destruction.

Kylo Ren has no idea how to forgive himself. She's pretty sure, even though he had family, they didn't understand how to grow the green inside him.

Someone was afraid of him, taught him to fear himself. Someone taught him how to grow thorns.

She was alone in isolation. He feels like someone who’s been alone, too, even though he was surrounded by people who loved him.

She wonders if that might not be worse.

Damn it, she doesn't want to feel sorry for him. He's a monster.

\---

It's not wrong to want to save him, Luke tells her.

She shakes her head and works on a staff-saber, tweaking the salvaged crystals, making sure the facets are clean and perfect. Steady beams. She knows why Ren’s was different, now. She wonders if part of him hopes the cracked crystal will finally succumb to inevitability every time uses his blade.

It sounds like him. 

She wonders if that's why he wanted the Skywalker lightsaber. She didn’t want it, doesn’t want it, and still thinks that’s a reasonable reaction. It’s seen too much pain.

She wants something that's hers, something that's clean of all history except what she gives it. The blue saber she brought with her still sounds like screaming children.

There are too many screams in her head as it is.

\---

_Where are you?_

She doesn't answer.

\---

He offered to teach her. He keeps offering. She doesn't want to learn anything he knows.

She understands the impulse, though. She wants to teach him, too. On its own, that wouldn't be so bad.

Even caught against each other’s jagged edges, they both feel the same drive to make each other _better_. So she could learn to live with the desire to fix him.

It's how she wants to do it that's the problem.

\---

He finds her, of course.

“Go away.”

He wavers.

He doesn't.

He's startled by the staff, when it flares to life in her hand. She has a weapon she’s used to, this time, and an advantage. He doesn’t know what to expect, and she’s willing to fight dirty. She knocks him down and holds the bright edge of her saber at his throat. He did the same to her, once.

“Stay down,” she says.

He does.

She doesn't look back, when she leaves, but she knows; he keeps his eyes on her back until she’s out of sight. He stays where she put him until she’s off the planet.

The knowledge sings through her.

Her Force sensitivity is improving, she tells herself. That's all it is.

\---

That’s not all it is.

\---

He's quiet in her mind, for once. Not screaming in pain.

It should be an improvement.

Somehow, though, it’s even more distracting. He's _sad_.

She puts a pillow over her face to muffle a string of curses. It seems polite not to disturb her copilot.

She does feel better, after. She knocks around the galley for a few minutes so that she can project the feeling of drinking tea. Jakku was far too hot, even at night, for tea. Even if it hadn’t been, she couldn’t have gotten any. So it’s fun, and new, and different, and she can offer comfort and glee in equal measure.

It’s nice. Space is vast and cold and empty, but she has a little pod of pleasant warmth between her palms.

She’s enjoying it for herself. Pushing the feeling towards him isn’t as simple or as easily justified. She tries not to think about her reasons. 

(He is never kind to himself, and someone ought to be.)

\---

“Let me teach you,” he begs.

“What do you want me to know?”

He struggles with the words.

Everything, his mind whispers.

“You don't know everything,” she snaps, “and you couldn't teach it even if you did.”

\---

They still fight. It’s a terrible idea, but they can’t not; neither of them can escape the other’s gravity well, but they’re not in a stable orbit, either. Conflict is inevitable.

So they fight.

She knows what she's doing, now, at least. She has a staff, comfortably familiar, and if she’s not fully trained, well, neither is he.

He's being careless, a little flashy; showing off like this is a dance rather than a fight. He is ASKING to get stabbed, and she’s not going to oblige. She doesn't rake him across the spine or go for vulnerable points.

She could. She doesn’t.

She flicks the blades of her staff off and uses the haft to whack him across the upper back. Enough force to bruise, but not enough to do worse.

He stumbles away, wheels back to face her while she's still deciding if she needs to put him on the ground. 

She wants to, which probably means she shouldn’t.

He hesitates, looks at her powered-down weapon, and lowers his own. The red vanishes, the angry sputtering quiets.

She probably needs to get out of here before this gets stupid. Again.

He sees that thought process happening, and his eyes are desperate.

“Don't leave.”

Pleading. The green shoots from before are withering. She’s so frustrated that the words come boiling out:

“What do you even WANT from me?”

She shoves at him. Hard. She's angry, and that's wrong, but she's not using it - not for more than this. He stumbles, goes to one knee. Stays there. Looks up at her.

Their eyes lock, and she can tell it's both of them when they think, 

_This._

She really, really wants to wind her hand in his hair and yank his head back, bare his throat, see how much he'll take.

His pulse jumps in his throat. She's pretty sure he heard that.

She really, really wants to do it.

She is really, really not going to.

“You have a Master,” she spits, “and he's a monster and an he's trying to make you one too and probably succeeding.”

It doesn't matter that he looks pretty on his knees or that she could keep him there, because that has always been true, even when she didn’t know it. It doesn’t matter, because he hasn't changed his mind about anything important.

“Don't leave,” he says again, voice quiet and hoarse.

People aren't something you can scavenge, aren't something you can salvage, aren't something you can save. People who make terrible choices usually keep doing that. Change is a choice, and it's work, and it’s not something you can impose from outside. He's not going to change just because she knows how to push him.

His shoulders slump. He’s giving up, slipping further into the dark, withering.

And it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever done, but she doesn’t regret it when the words slip out;

“Come with me.”

\---

He does.

\---

He also pulls in and closes up, though. She has no idea what to do with that. He’s quiet, suddenly, which she didn’t expect at all. He’s almost entirely silent and folds himself into the smallest possible amount of space and she hates it.

He knows that, and it just makes everything worse.

When she can’t stand it anymore - can’t stand him not being there even though he is, can’t stand being totally alone when she’s sharing a few cubic meters of space with someone who needs her - she says, 

“Come here.”

He does.

She holds his eyes, sees the fine tremble around his mouth. He drops his gaze, and she feels the strangest surge of tenderness in response.

She's been going about this all wrong. To be fair, though, so has he.

She wraps a hand around the back of his neck, presses her thumb under his jaw. He sighs, all the tension flowing out of him at once.

“Good,” she says, lets herself stroke the dark hair at his nape. She still kind of wants to knot her fingers in it and _yank_. She compromises, lets herself tug a little. 

Gently.

She wants to ask what he needs, but this is still so new and so delicate that she could shatter it with a question.

It's like that old riddle; I am so fragile I can be broken by my name. Silence. But him, too.

So she doesn’t say anything.

She shepherds him into a bunk, situates his head on her thigh, pets his hair. She keeps her touch light. He falls asleep and she chases the nightmares out of his head.

\---

She wakes up and everything is green. She reached out for his mind in her sleep, and he let her in.

So she can tell that he's awake, if only just.

“You’re full of sunlight.” 

He says it quietly, marveling.

That seems appropriate, somehow. Green things need sun to survive. She could be okay alone - has been okay alone - but she likes this much better.

He catches some of that, and his thoughts start spiraling down into dark places. He tenses like he’s going to get up and do something stupid. She tugs a lock of his hair; distraction, not quite a rebuke.

“Stop that.”

He does, thoughts stuttering off well-worn tracks and skittering sideways, and she goes back to playing with his hair. It’s obviously a vanity, but he’s practically purring under her hands as she makes a mess of it. She can’t help the tiny, fond grin.

“You don't take very good care of yourself,” she muses. “I think that should be my job, for a bit, until you can be trusted to do it right.”

He hums quiet agreement and relaxes a little more.

If he needed nurturing, she'd be a terrible choice. She actually knows people who can be gentle and kind, now. She is not one of them.

Tending, though. Tending, she can probably do.

Maybe she has time for gardening after all.

\---

The version of herself that she sees in his head is a complete stranger. Unbending, unyielding, strong all the way through, a fixed point and a foundation to build on, keystone and compass mark. Bright-burning, a light in the darkness.

A sun to orbit.

She can't be all of that, but neither is she going to be another foundation that fails him. She is not going to let him build on sand.

She is not going to hurt him.

\---

She wakes, sweat-slick and panting, from a shared dream, and reconsiders.

She’s not going to hurt him _without asking,_ anyway.

\---

She does eventually let him teach her. A little bit. It makes him happy. She's wary about what he'd want to share, at first, but he wants it so badly that she listens.

Surprisingly, most of it feels more gray than anything; neutral, with the meaning determined by how it’s used. Their strengths are complementary, which is a pleasant surprise.

She improves by leaps and bounds, and all she ever reads from him is pleasure and satisfaction and admiration.

Sometimes they spar, too, which is _fun_. He never underestimates her, but he never wants to win badly enough to really leverage his advantages (height, weight, reach). She always wants to win, and she grew up fighting dirty.

He doesn't give her the victories, but he wants her to have them. And if they both like her putting him on the floor more than maybe they should, well, it's not hurting anyone.

\---

General Organa is very happy to see her son. Kylo Ren is not very happy to see his mother.

Leia calls him Ben and he starts shaking.

Rey makes an excuse and drags him off to a storage room and pulls him down until he can tuck his face against her shoulder. It has to be uncomfortable - he's too tall for this - but as soon as she thinks it, he sinks onto his knees and presses into her stomach, instead. She curls over him like shelter, pets his hair and wonders how you shield someone from the pain of wounds they already have.

“Come on,” she says, when he's breathing normally again.

She's not sure where they're going, yet, but he doesn't ask.

\---

It's strange to see his face lit by a color other than red. Nice, though. They lock up, sparring, and she grins.

“Suits you,” she tells him.

He ducks his head when he smiles, hair covering his face but not hiding the pleased curl of his mouth.

She takes advantage of his distraction, of course, but the compliment was sincere.

\---

The real surprise, when she finally kisses him, is mostly that it took so long. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> I came home from the movie and was compelled to write this, because my brain was screaming about how Rey needs to put Kylo Ren on his knees and pet his hair and make him stop wrecking everything (up to and including himself). Then I waffled about whether or not to clean it up and post it, but I think the world needs more Dom!Rey/sub!Kylo.


End file.
